Earth Island News

Viva Sierra Gorda

CO2, poverty, and biodiversity

After nearly 10 years of struggle, Bosque Sustentable – a civil society
organization that specializes in the promotion of sustainable forestry
– and the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve made their first carbon sale
in March 2006, generating income for local families. This sale signals
a powerful step towards sustainable growth for the inhabitants of the
Reserve, who from 1998 to 2004 sought opportunities to enter the carbon
market created by the Kyoto Protocol. Finding this path fraught with
difficulties, they attempted the private carbon market instead,
eventually making a sale to the United Nations Foundation.

The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve is in the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range in the northern extreme
of the State of Queretaro, Mexico. At almost a million acres, the
Reserve covers 32 percent of the state’s territory. It is an
integrated-use park, with areas designated for core protection, buffer
zones, rehabilitation, and sustainable development. About 15 percent of
its total surface area is in designated core zones, with the rest under
various degrees of human impact.

Located in a transition zone
between the Nearctic and Neotropical bio-geographical regions, the
Reserve is the most ecologically diverse natural protected area in
Mexico. The Reserve’s vegetation types include semi-desert scrub,
temperate forests of pines and oaks, cloud forests, dry tropical
forests, and tropical rainforests. Ranking second among Mexico’s
protected areas in terms of biodiversity, the Sierra Gorda is home to
all six species of Mexican felines: jaguar, puma, bobcat, margay,
ocelot, and jaguarundi.

Grupo Ecologico Sierra GordaDistiribution of seedlings from national nurseries

Unlike national parks in the US,
protected areas throughout Latin America often include human
settlements and agricultural land. More than half of the Sierra Gorda
Reserve is grazed, while an additional 13 percent is in agricultural
production. Slash-and-burn agriculture is common in the Reserve’s
history. Most of the approximately 100,000 inhabitants live in severe
poverty. In some areas, more than 70 percent of the economically active
population receives an income equivalent to less than US $8 per day.
Illegal migration to the US is widespread.

The Kyoto carbon market

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol allows
developed nations to offset their carbon emissions by investing in
carbon mitigation projects in developing countries. The carbon
sequestered or preempted by such a project is then credited to the
investing nation. Developed countries can thus reduce total emissions
without actually reducing their own emissions, while supporting
sustainable development in other countries.

Bosque Sustentable, founded in 2002, worked closely with Grupo Ecologico Sierra Gorda and the management of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve towards
entering the CDM market. In their plan to promote sustainable forestry
in the Reserve, marginal and exhausted agricultural land would be
reforested, and the proceeds from the sales of carbon emission credits
would support the project until the timber reached a harvestable size.

Bosque Sustentable encountered several barriers to entering the CDM
market, many of which are common to areas of poverty in Mexico and
throughout Latin America. They included the lack of capital for
developing projects, the lack of forest management skills among local
landholders, and the high cost of emission reductions certification,
which resulted in money going into the hands of foreign consultants
rather than to local people.

The pattern of land ownership in
the Sierra Gorda also presented problems for Bosque Sustentable, as
landholders have an average plantation size of only one hectare. This
means that for a project of about 1,250 acres, small by international
standards, Bosque Sustentable must work with 500 different landholders
scattered throughout the mountains. These properties lack telephone
service and are accessible only by rough unpaved roads, dramatically
increasing the per-unit costs of carbon sequestration. In addition,
most landholders don’t hold title to the property in their own name.
The title to the property is often in the name of a deceased relative,
and while possession is not in dispute, legal costs and exorbitant
notary fees prevent the landholders from updating the titles.

Voluntary carbon

For these and other reasons, Bosque Sustentable and its partner
organizations abandoned efforts to enter the CDM market. “For years we
heard that the Clean Development Mechanism was a tool for sustainable
development,” said Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, director of the Sierra
Gorda Biosphere Reserve. “The reality is that the CDM is light-years
away from the needs of areas of poverty.”

Instead, Bosque
Sustentable is focusing on the voluntary carbon market. Its program of
Carbon Sequestration for Sustainable Forestry in the Sierra Gorda
Biosphere Reserve is aimed at organizations, businesses, and
individuals that not only want to contribute to the fight against
global warming, but also want to fight poverty and conserve
biodiversity.

This Sierra Gorda carbon sequestration project was developed with the assistance of Woodrising Consulting, Inc. and the Biodiversity Conservation in the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve project, supported by the Global Environment Facility. The project sequesters carbon by reforesting agricultural lands in and around the Reserve. The project sequesters carbon by reforesting agricultural lands in and around the reserveIt
preserves old-growth forests by making regulated plantations the
primary source of wood for the region. The project also fights poverty
through the creation of numerous small-scale landholder-managed
plantations. Participants include private and communal landowners, as
well as landholders with a record of possession from the local
government. All participants sign contracts committing to manage their
plantations for carbon sequestration for 30 years, and transfer the
legal right to emission reductions to Bosque Sustentable.

Making the sale

The sale of emission reductions provides the financial incentives
needed for landowner participation until the plantations reach
sufficient maturity to provide an income from sustainable harvesting. A
team of community organizers and forestry experts organize the
landowners into associations and provide them with professional
training on silvicultural techniques, sustainable forestry management,
wood transformation technologies, product development and marketing,
and business management.

The project requires up-front payments from buyers for the sequestration of carbon during a project life of 30 years.

The sale to the UN Foundation of 5,230 emission reduction credits is the first for the
project. As part of its commitment to carbon neutral operations, the UN
Foundation used the methodology of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol
Initiative and tools provided by the World Resources Institute to calculate its total carbon emissions from electricity consumption, heating and cooling, and air travel at its Washington, DC and New York offices. With pro bono legal services generously proved by Baker & McKenzie,
the UN Foundation then purchased an equivalent amount of carbon offsets
from Bosque Sustentable, which received the assistance of the Mexican Center for Environmental Law.

The original version of this article first appeared in Voluntary Carbon Markets: An International Business Guide to What They Are and How They Work, published by Earthscan.